We recently acquired a “marsh feed pump” for our steam launch from Chris McMullen, a friend out of New Zealand; he first got the piece from Portsmouth, N.H., so it’s done quite a bit of traveling! Chris is also working on creating an H.M. Co. steam replica. Don has been working on the pump since it came in.

Meanwhile, Bill has been cutting out the steam launch’s oak stern post, and Bern has been working on the keelson.

Over the past few weeks, the crew has been working tediously to construct the steam ship as precisely as we can. Now that the ribs are curved and attached to the larger vessel, the team had begun shaping the large keel plank.

After these poor souls’ seemingly endless toil, we were left with a keel plank that, when laid out on the boat, fits on very well! A few imperfections here and there, but that’s for another time.

Work has begun building a section of launch #199. We are building the launch true to HMCo techniques as best we can. The section will be about 2/3 of the length of the 30 foot launch (frames 7 to 26) – enough to include the engine cooling line underwater.

The first step was to build a lofting table on which the forms for the ribs will be built:

Notice the supreme concentration……

The lofting table was built to allow full size creation of the rib forms.

Using a table of offsets, each rib mold was laid out on the table:

All the forms were then combined upside down to form the basis for actually building the boat:

While the boat hull is being built, the layout of the engine and boiler is under study. The drawing we are working from shows a little detail on the installation:

Unfortunately, some detail is missing on piping and peripherals. So we are reaching out for help from others. One interesting museum near us is the New England Wireless and Steam Museum (www.newsm.org) that actually has a much bigger version of an HMCo steam engine on display that actually runs! See our visit earlier in this blog.

We have also enlisted Chris McMullen from New Zealand as a technical advisor. He is building FROM SCRATCH a copy of our engine and the associated Marsh Pump and is also building a replica of the vessel “Vapor” to put it all in! Amazing!

So the display of the triple engine and boiler is complete as standalone pieces but wouldn’t it be great if we could show how they would have been installed in a real boat!

Here is a picture of “Vapor” which actually had a similar configuration to ours installed:

Launch “Vapor”

It just so happens that we have plans for a different hull #199 which was a 30 foot launch that fits the bill and was similar to “Vapor”! Also, Herreshoff has on display in T. F. Green airport in Providence, Rhode Island the vessel “Two Forty” that resembles “Vapor”. The primary difference is that the “Two Forty” displayed is set up for a gasoline engine built around 1937:

(Note the industrious workers inspecting “Two Forty”)!

It’s amazing how narrow these boats are:

Here’s another shot showing the bow:

The “Crew” made the trip to view “Two Forty” to get a feeling on how these boats were built. In particular, we wanted to study the way the ribs and planking were done:

Our new task is to build an actual hull section to display the engine and boiler. We plan to build a full sized section of the hull with part of one side cut out to show the installation.

One interesting note about our field trip was that even though this bunch of guys was crawling all over this boat in the baggage arrival section, the only time anyone seemed to care was when a policeman with a dog (assumed to be a bomb sniffer) walked by! If only actually flying was this easy!